Nerf Superman: DC Universe Online

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The Gamescom 2010 trailers keep on coming. VG247 noticed the latest one for DC Universe, which sort of sets up the moral question at the heart of the game. As in, is vigilante justice ever really justified, or is it just proto-fascism? As in, whether you want to be naughty or nice. Pictured is the Joker, who generally leans a little naughty. He’s punching Nightwing, who generally leans a little nice. Except isn’t Nightwing Batman at the moment? Would now be an apposite moment to mention Eddie Argos of Art Brut & friend’s new project, Spoiler Alert!, being songs about the Justice League. The Batman one which should enlighten you all about the current continuity. Anyway, out on November 2nd and here’s the videosity…

In passing, last time I crossed path with Argos, he mentioned he was up to this. I noted that if he did songs about old PC games, RPS readers alone would probably make him rich, or at least keep him in ketchup. C’mon, Eddie. Do a song about X-COM.

Well, it is an MMO, so realistically what’s it going to look like? MMO = essentially turn-based combat, so no reflexes-based action gameplay or paired animations, plus standard RPG dynamics (which exist in MMOs for various reasons)… it really doesn’t take much before it starts to look like every other existing MMO.

I meant like guys with Teleportation powers renting themselves out to the super-rich for something like $10,000 a (two second) trip from one side of the world to another. You could even offset your taxes by donating your $5000 per second services to hospitals that need to transport donor organs.

I use to think this:
Superheros just weaken the society where lives. Too much reliance on the powers of these superbeings. Actually Evil Masters are much better for society, because make such society stronger.

Then I learned this:
While superheros will make society weaker, will also serve as a example, and a guide…somehow. “You can be this awesome”. And stuff like that.
Evil Masters produce the effect “you can’t have nice things anymore”. A society would want to built a tower made of glass, but can’t because the jerk with evil intentions will destroy it. In a way, the Evil Master will weak the society in a indirect way.

The best superhero would be one that act in a heroic way, but is unreliable so the society still have to built giganteous robots to defend the city, and his secret identity is a Evil Master that purposelly avoid to be a jerk, but is still evil.

He helped soceity by ushring a world peace by basically making us fear an alien race(in the comics) or dr manhattem(in the film). I didn’t agree with it though…it cost millions of lives to do and sooner or later someone would have twigged the aliens weren’t coming for them anymore and just got back to how we normally are. it would take that level of destruction say every 10 years to bring about peace forever. Which wouldn’t be worth the cost.

Truth be told I always found Ozymandias’ reasoning to be incredibly flawed, but he neatly sidestepped any kind of ethical debate by teleporting a telepathic genetically engineered fake alien corpse into New York.

Man that seems so stupid now I come to type it.

Anyway, there’s a reason Rorschach gets all the fans, and it’s not because he’s all grim and dark (because seriously, a few criminal beatings isn’t anything on what Ozymanias did) it’s because he has an uncompromising (if warped) moral code.

The fake “alien” invading New York plot was a deliberate reference to a bizarre Ronald Reagan speech in which in mused that the only way the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could come together is if the world faced the threat of alien invasion.

“There are many bourgeois historians who believe that history is made by “Great Men and Women”, kings and queens, statesmen and politicians. It is this unscientific approach that Marxism is opposed to. However, Marxists do not deny the role of individuals in history. History is made by people. But we need to uncover the dialectical relationship between the individual (the subjective) and the great forces (objective) that govern the movement of society and see this role in its historical context […followed by some stuff about Hugo Chavez…].”

So, batman generates a sphere of bats as an attack? I would think he’s an NPC so they wouldn’t have to add generic AoE attack to him and just let him do what he usually does. Or stand there with an exclamation mark over his head.

But all the ‘new’ (read: player example) characters looked, well, dull.

The first guy shown looks like the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle’s silly-venom-type evil opposite Black Beetle, the woman looked like a knockoff of Judomaster, and the rest of the guys looked like old Marvel 90’s armor-suit dorks like … gah, what was that useless dork’s name… Annex!

i want to like this, really I do. I love the world and have been reading it (or watching it) for the last 40 some odd years. However – the characters in this look like lame approximations of Image/early 90s Marvel characters all unnecessarily bulky and with ridiculous costume pieces. I don’t think Jim Lee’s character design really helps in that regard. Wonder Woman at least looks better than in that death of the superheroes trailer.

This desperately needs someone that knows the lore well handling it – James Robinson for example. It could be a living breathing world because of all the things we know about these characters – and it could do so in a much more convincing way than CoX who still has to bulid it from scratch. Iconic, well loved characters with real drama. The question is – can they make it interesting. What we see here is completely generic gameplay you could find on CO, CoX.

There is nothing in this trailer, *other than the iconic figures we all know and love* that makes it even the teensiest bit different. Only writing and characterization can deliver it from being useless. If they think that the love of the franchise is enough to carry it I think they have a rude awakening coming to them. However, if they’d done it in the DCAU and directed it at a lover age bracket, while still making it accessible to adults they might have gotten away with that level of laziness. Maybe.

Other questions remain such as how will magic be handled, can one be part of or allied to Darkseid or the New Gods, will we see the Legion, will there be writers arcs, etc. Will we be able to talk to Billy Batson on the street? Will there be voice characterizations or merely the usual boring word balloons? These can be differentiations.

OK I’m done ranting for now. Hopefully that made some amount of sense.

Things I’d like to see – working with Golden Age heroes preferably during World War II (Paul Kirk Manhunter comes to mind), seriously weird Dr. Fate and the Spectre stuff replete with all the appropriately psychedelic art , Eclipso, Metamorpho, the Doom Patrol, stuff that’s interesting. Eventually there will be a need to write your own arc. The huge yearly crossovers could have some relevancy when players feel involved with it.